Promoting public transport – what appeals to generation Z

Abstract

The paper focuses on advertising campaigns used for public transport promotion. Today’s efforts to achieve a better living environment and to expand more sustainable forms of mobility are closely linked to increasing the attractiveness of public transport systems. One of the widely used ways are advertising campaigns aimed at attracting passengers to public transport vehicles. In this paper, four realized video advertising campaigns (one Danish, three Czech; two focusing on urban public transport, one on train and one on bus regional transport) are presented in more detail. Opinions of representatives of Generation Z from the Czech Republic (more precisely, persons between 19 and 28 years of age; both users and non-users of public transport) were obtained through face-to-face and online surveys. The relationships between video likeability, uselessness, ability to represent reality, ability to improve the image of public transport and ability to attract new passengers to public transport were investigated. It appears that the more “dynamic” campaigns, which do not represent the real situation as much, are generally evaluated to be more useless, while the likeability depends on the execution of the particular campaign. A moderate correlation can be observed between the likeability of a video and its perceived ability to attract new passengers to public transport or at least to improve the public perception of public transport. At the same time, it appears that most of the selected transport campaigns did not reach Generation Z very well (although they were videos presented on social media). The findings suggested in this paper can be used to design advertising campaigns that can better affect Generation Z. In particular, trying to tune in to the “in and cool wave” of the younger generation can be quite counterproductive. Young people’s preference for public transport can be seen as crucial – young people form transport habits that likely prevail for most of their lives.